On arriving in London, accompanied by Tom Rockets, I went to the house of a relative of ours in Bloomsbury Square, one of the most fashionable and elegant quarters of London. He and his wife were very grand people, but they had a fancy for patronising celebrities small and great, and having by some chance heard that I had seen a good deal of service, and could talk about what I had seen, they begged I would come and see them, and make their house my home. I took them at their word, though I think they were somewhat astonished when Tom and I arrived in a coach with our traps stored inside and out of it. They looked, at all events, as if I had tumbled from the moon. However, I made myself perfectly at home, and we soon became great friends. I was on the point of leaving them when a letter reached me from Captain Luttrell, prolonging my leave, and I found that I might have remained three weeks longer at home. When they heard of it, they most kindly invited me to remain on with them. I amused myself pretty well, after I had seen all the sights of London, by wandering about and examining the outside, as it were, of the huge metropolis. One of the places at which I found myself was the suburb of Tyburn, to the north of Hyde Park. It was a considerable distance from London itself, and well it might be, for here was the place of execution of all ordinary malefactors. One day I was passing this spot when I saw four carts approaching. In each of them were three persons sitting, with their arms closely pinioned. On each side of the carts rode public officers, the sheriffs, city marshals, the ordinary of Newgate, and others. I asked a bystander where they were going and what was to be done to them, for I did not know at the time that I was near Tyburn.
“Why, of course, they are all going to be hung,” was his reply. “We are pretty well accustomed to such sights about here.”
“Are they all murderers?” I asked, thinking, perhaps, that they were a gang of pirates.
“No—oh no!” said my friend. “They are mostly guilty of robbery, though. You will hear what they have to say for themselves before they are turned off; I will learn for you, if you have a curiosity to know.”
He went away, and soon returned with a paper on which were written the names of the malefactors and their crimes. One had stolen some wearing apparel; another had robbed a gentleman of his watch on the highway; a third had purloined some silks and ribbons from a shop, and so on. None of the crimes, that I remember, were attended with violence, and most of the criminals were mere lads, from seventeen to twenty years of age, and only one or two above it. I remarked this to my companion.
“Yes,” he observed. “The older ones are too knowing to be caught.”
The poor lads seemed terribly agitated and cast down at their approaching fate, and shed abundance of tears. One after the other was led up to the fatal drop and cast off. I could not stop to see the end, but hurried away. I had seen hundreds of my fellow-creatures die, but I hoped that I might never again see any put to death as these were.
After this I went down to Chatham to see how the ship was getting on, and then returned to London. I found the city in a complete state of uproar and confusion. It was on a Friday, the 2nd of June, when Tom and I made our way towards the Houses of Parliament, for I had heard that Lord George Gordon was going with a large body of people to present a protest against the repeal of any of the penal laws against the Roman Catholics. I wanted to see the fun. There must have been twenty thousand people at least, who arrived in three different bodies before the Houses of Parliament. Here they behaved very orderly, and dispersed after being addressed by some of the magistrates; but the mob in other places broke out into all sorts of excesses, and as we went home we found them busily employed in demolishing a Romish Chapel in Duke Street, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields. They hauled out all the ornaments, and what they thought of no value they trampled under foot, but the rest they made off with. Several houses, either belonging to Romanists, or inhabited by persons supposed to be favourable to them, we saw completely gutted. The same sort of work went on for several days. At last I got so completely mixed up with one of the mobs that I could not get free of them.
“Here, you look a likely man to lead us!” exclaimed a fellow standing near me. “Where shall we go next?”
I did not answer him, but endeavoured to get away. This did not suit him.